


Day 5. Chicken | Titan Among Man

by steadycoffeeflow (Salimity)



Series: Inktober 2018 [5]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Elijah and Frankenstein could be asshole brothers, Gentle Monsters, Gratuitous use from The Modern Prometheus, Inktober 2018, Mary Shelley is my girl, Victor Frankenstein is a Little Shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-28 06:12:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16717891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Salimity/pseuds/steadycoffeeflow
Summary: Elijah Kamski has created a new race, powerful and mighty enough to replace humans. He assumes the worst of them, even when one of his best designs comes to him with a tender plea for companionship.Frankenstein AU where RK900 is The Machine/The Monster, and Elijah Kamski is Dr. Frankenstein.





	Day 5. Chicken | Titan Among Man

**Author's Note:**

> What even was this day's Inktober prompt? In any case, if you like anything RK900 says here, thank your gal Mary Shelley for being amazing. Mostly everything The Machine says here is a direct word-for-word of her beautifully crafted lines and I really do her a disservice, forgive me.

 

My work station was a culmination of my thoughts and labors of life. Many of the baubles I had collected during my adventures and studies, pieces promising to be the integral piece that made up this reticent existence some call life. Scattered pieces of clay that belonged to some larger whole, the cuneiform etched onto its surface not used in a span of millenia. Parchment, dried and made of both plant and flesh, the stark red ink harboring ill-will promise. Bones, belonging to both chicken and man, strung up by wire to remind us - me specifically - of what we all must eventually turn to.

And there  _ he _ was, the marvel of my absolute design. My Creation, both beautiful and terrible in his hulking form. His pale skin stretched taut over his knuckles as he gripped the edges of my desk. Hair, the smoke of ruins smoldering under the wrath of god, fell just so above his eyes that struck ice into my very veins. There within the steel-grey of them was a twilight of a world I had only brushed my fingertips against and, in doing so, had disturbed the threads of the cosmos.

What I had woven had ultimately become my undoing - threatened to become all of mankind’s undoing.

Beyond him lay the ruination - the focal point of our current confrontation - wrent apart by some cruel intent of fate. Wires - metallic coils and threads I had so artfully designed and encased within the pure white shell of the Machine’s existence - were exposed now to the chilling air like twisted bones in an amphitheatre of knowledge.

“You will repair him, Kamski,” the Machine said, leaning forward a fraction to underscore his unsaid threat. It hung between us, the weight of it crushing all breath from my chest, robbing me of voice. “You will repair him, for me, and make him live again.”

Barely, within time, I found my breath and courage to speak under his withering, chilling gaze. “And if I refuse?”

A flicker of amusement. He had been prepared for that response, my beautiful Machine. He stepped back from my desk, considering the broken body before him, circling it. “You know of my intentions, how I would break every last human soul I could grip between my lifeless fingers you’ve given me?”

My mouth was dry as I considered this, his capabilities. As a Machine, he was far more adept and calculating than any human could hope to be. Resilient, capable of both inflicting and withstanding more horrors than a human could ever imagine. Even more so than his first design, the predecessor of an angel that lay broken between the two of us now.

When I did not answer, the Machine spoke once more, voice rising in the heat of his rage. “For the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all of humanity. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine. And rage - oh my rage - the likes of which should not ever find escape. But if I cannot satisfy the one? I will indulge the other.”

The Machine swept his hand to his broken predecessor. “If I cannot inspire love from even the one who created me, by the machinations borne of your own hands and mind?” The hand continued in its arch to include me. “Then I will surely inspire fear.”

“Threats are it then?” I voiced.

“Threats are all you have given me, since I first awoke under your oh so tender care, Creator. Kamski, I ought to be your Adam, but rather I am the fallen angel, am I not? But without the tender care of the one before us, the fallen angel becomes the malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation.”

At the pounding of his fist on the metal examination table, I jumped, despite myself. “But the others have rejected me. Humans, your ilk, have cast me aside. The only one who understood me and accepted me lies before us, deposed.” A hand trembled just along the constructed cheek bones of the RK800. The fingertips withdrew before they could fleet along the lifeless shell. “I am alone.”

The emotions poured forth before me were almost enough to assuage me, even with all my wealth and mountain of logic and knowledge on my side. The Everest affirmation that I was a true human, a living breathing creature of God and the knowledge that what was before me was merely a Machine. A facsimile of true grandeur. Even I was almost convinced this portrayal was true.

Perhaps the Machine believed it too, for all his conviction and performance. 

I did not know what to say, to give words to the desolate fear within me that we could not have two of him, two Machines pure and grand and divine, walking amongst humanity. For combined, they were the sword swung by Damocles; humanity’s oracles and executioners alike.

In the absence of my consent, the Machine spoke once more, voice tumbling glass shards. “I am alone and miserable. Only someone as ugly as I am could love me.”

It was not his appearance that the Machine spoke of now. His predecessor appeared as he did, though I had been a fool to harden the edges of his Predecessor's jawline, acquire and craft the steel chill rather than the warmth of the earth for his eyes. No, I imagined his ugliness to be that of life’s stark rejection of himself. A Machine that believed itself living. Perhaps a cruel and awful fate to stand before, solitary. But with another at his side, perhaps bearable.

I could not allow it.

“You yourself spoke of ill-intent,” I said, gathering up my spirit. “Against humans. Against me. I can’t trust that, once I rebuild the RK800 for you, this companion of yours, that you wouldn’t be even more fearsome in your combined force. What guarantees can you provide me that this wouldn’t be so?”

The Machine ducked his head as I spoke, gathering up the bundles of synthetic nerves and muscles at his neck. Simulating stress. Mimicking the burden of grief. “I was made benevolent and good. You know this, the hope you wove into my circuits. The hope for something better for humanity, that we would be strong enough to carry your futures.” He looked up and I held my own this time, raising a chin in a strike of defiance. This made his lip curl into a horrid sneer. “Misery has made me a fiend. Make me happy, Kamski, grant my sole desire, and I shall again be virtuous.”

“I won’t allow it,” I replied, still stoking the flames of my courage for this climactic moment. He could not rebuild the RK800 himself, and without me he was lost. I was encouraged by this singular fact.

In response, his rage was stoked, stealing the fuel of my personal fires.

The Machine plunged his hands into his predecessor's shattered chest. His hands pulled back thirum rich, the dead heart of the other mangled in his fingers.

I, despite myself and previous boldness that had struck this blaze to my veins, flinched back at the sight of such a horrid thing. At the timbre of fury that melted the Machine’s voice. This was just a show of his rage, rabid and strained as it were, pulling taut the leash of his restraint. Indigo ink from the Book of Life flecked my face as the Machine flung the disembodied pump onto my desk, scattering those whispering secrets and pieces of Grand Mystery.

“Listen to me, Kamski, and listen well,” his voice shook in the lab, making even the grand space of my life’s work cower and grow small before him. “You accuse me -  _ me -  _ of murder, and yet you, with satisfied conscious, destroy your own creatures. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man!”

Fury Incarnate turned upon me, eyes wild as a storm at sea. “If you do not grant me my wish within three days, you will witness the full potential of what you’ve created, Maker of Mine. Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”

The Machine strode out of the lab having said all he wanted to say unto me, leaving naught but the broken body of potential before me, and the weight of what I had unleashed upon humanity crushing my feeble imagination’s potential to see a way out of this situation.


End file.
